Sunday, 22 April 2012

There’s a lot of noise out there, but there’s also a huge amount
of good stuff, your job is to find the great stuff. For example, if
you’re a newspaper then do the investigative journalism, get into the detail
and find the facts behind the story. I can get opinion and newsfeeds faster
than you can go to print, get me the truth and I will buy your paper.

There are no longer any gatekeepers. You no
longer control either the creation of, or access to, content. This doesn’t have
to be a threat, this can be your next opportunity, You have spent the second
half of the last century amassing experts in your field, be they A&R men,
cinematographers, editors, investigative journalists or any other media
professionals. If, in the last decade’s rush to bottom, you haven’t got rid of
them all, these are the people who can differentiate your offering from the
millions of bytes of user-generated content that is uploaded every second.

Note: this does not mean take your existing
content, stick it on the web and hope.

Differentiation is an opportunity for
monetisation.

Take the journalism example in the opening
paragraph: “explosion wipes Doncaster off the map*” is a headline that screams
across the web faster than any formal news channel can keep pace. But at that
pace, and by the mechanisms of blogs, twitter and youtube, that’s almost all
you’ll actually know half an hour after you first hear about it.

If you follow someone local to the incident
you may pick up the name of the factory and a couple of nice photos (assuming
it’s a daytime incident**). But the impacts of it, and the reasons behind it?
That’s the opportunity; I’ve yet to see a spokesman giving a press-conference
to “citizen journalists”.

This is even more important if there is
anything unusual about the incident. At a time when it is easier than ever to
disseminate misinformation and lies, the need for good investigative journalism
and a trustworthy 4th estate is greater than ever.***

This level of integrity is something that
can be charged for, either by means of a paywall (see the Financial Times) or
by actually selling pulped bits of felled trees (see Private Eye).

Expanding out from news reporting, we can
see the same opportunities in other fields. There’s plenty of raw talent out
there but very few people who, from scratch, can apply the necessary polish or
have a wide enough network to achieve a critical mass for distribution.

Unsurprisingly this ties back into the Add
Value and Be Brave sections, but it boils down to answering two questions:

why would a content creator want to work
with you?

Why would a content consumer come to you
(and pay you) for this content?

If your answers to those questions are
about where and how you improve the quality, distribution and uptake of that
content then you’re on the right lines.

If your answers to those questions are
about how people have to come through you to distribute their content, how they
are legally required to use your services to access the content or how only you
can provide this content, then you’re a sitting duck.

* Some good news travels fast****

** Thinking of the 2011 London riots, it’s
interesting how little user-generated video footage there is that is really
watchable, mostly because camera-phones still don’t operate well in low-light.
This is also an opportunity.

*** Don’t rest on your laurels though,
taking the London riots example again, a number of twitter users started to
independently validate and curate tweets about the riots and built up a stream
of trustworthy sources for tracking the activity. These sources ranged from
established journalists to a chap who just got on his bike and went to look at
any alleged riot areas.